Product Reviews by KVR Members

Bought this (cheap!) as part of a Sonovox package with Eighty-Eight piano and the Orchestral Companion Brass, Strings and Woodwinds. I love the other instruments and would really like to love this one, but unfortunately, it crashes (and takes down your DAW) instantly upon being sent a MIDI note. You can play the sounds using the tiny-and-less-than-useful interface graphical buttons. Oh, well... maybe it'll get updated? Not holding my breath.

This is the worst money I've ever spent on a VST instrument. Most of the patches are unusable except in one key or at one tempo (your choice). That's right, there is no time/pitch manipulation here beyond playing the samples faster as you go up the keyboard. I just can't imagine that anyone who's ever used a computer to make music actually designed this. Total amateur hour. A must to avoid. Is this a hundred characters yet?

First, a word of caution about database sinkholes: it seems like a good idea - a way to easily access all of the audio in your library using searchable tags. A real time saver, right? And this one is free! But what about those tags? Where do they come from? How useful are they to you? Is it easy to edit them? Here's how this one works: when you import libraries, ADSR Sample Manager does an analysis of each file to try an determine some things about it. Is it audio (it does a good job of ignoring non-audio files)? Is it a loop or a one-shot? What is the key? If it's a loop, what tempo? Beyond that, it gets pretty esoteric and iffy. What instrument? What genre? What's the label (creator tag)? And a bunch of other stuff you may or may not find useful. So how well does the ADSR Sample Manager perform this analysis and auto-tagging? Unfortunately, not real well. For the basic stuff (loop/shot, tempo, key) it does ok - maybe 75% accurate. For the other stuff it is wildly inaccurate. Here's an example: after importing most of my 770 GB library, I had 397 files tagged as CAT (I had one sound effect file that was a cat), but zero tagged as BASS (I'm certain I have thousands of files that could be tagged BASS, many have Bass in the file name). Looking at the results of the import/tagging process, I realized I'd have to do a lot of editing to make it useful to me. I really don't need thousands of files tagged DIRTY or DISCO. I spent upwards of forty hours editing tags. Though there are multi-select and edit functions, using them crashes the ADSR Sample Manager (and your DAW) consistently. This does seem to be related to the size of the database - before I imported my entire library I was able to edit multiple files without crashing. So after all that work, I was set to use my timesaving device, right? Wrong, the first time I tried to use it after my massive editing job, it asked to rescan as it seemed to believe the library had changed. I said "sure" and the ADSR Sample Manager began scanning only to crash on completion. Does that every time now. Guess I'll never be able to update my library again...

Long story short, be aware that this "timesaver" may be a time sinkhole. It may be useful to me long-term as it might allow me to search my library more thoroughly and efficiently, but I doubt I'll ever "save" the amount of time I've spent trying to make it work. And the crashing is super annoying.

Unbelievably good for the money. Woodwinds, brass and strings are great. The piano seems very deep. The Big Bang orchestral percussion crashes whenever it receives MIDI. Oh well, maybe it'll get updated?